When Everything Changed (45 page)

AIDS was identified and named in 1982, but it only really hit general American consciousness in 1985, when actor Rock Hudson announced the disease that was killing him was what people were beginning to call “the gay plague.” It quickly became clear that AIDS could be spread by heterosexual sex, too.
Near panic ensued
, and by 1986 an expert from the federal Centers for Disease Control was predicting that up to 10 percent of the population would contract AIDS within a few years unless there were revolutionary changes in sexual behavior. When
Fatal Attraction
became one of the hit movies of 1987, feminists worried that the tale of how Glenn Close beds a happily married Michael Douglas and then turns into a murderous stalker of her ex-lover and his wife was a parable about the evils of the unmarried career woman. But many people saw it as a metaphor for AIDS and how the classic one-night stand could become a death sentence not only to the casual adulterers but to their families as well.

“R
APE ME
, L
UKE
!”

In 1981
Newsweek
announced
that
General Hospital,
a long-running afternoon soap opera, had suddenly become “Television’s Hottest Show”—not only “the highest rated daytime show in the history of television, but a genuine pop culture phenomenon.” In a pre-TiVo world, college students ditched classes and crowded in front of dormitory TV sets to watch, as did shoppers at department-store electronics sections and travelers in airport lounges. The drawing card was the romance of Luke and Laura, the fractious, sexually overcharged couple who were on the run from the mob, stranded on a tropical island with a mad scientist, and finally united in matrimony in one of the biggest events in the TV decade.

Only the die-hard feminists had any complaints, it seemed, about the fact that the young lovers first got together when he raped her.
Laura (played by
19-year-old Genie Francis) was married and working for Luke (played by 34-year-old Anthony Geary) when he declared his passion and forced himself upon her on the floor of an abandoned nightclub to a disco beat. Astonishingly few people seemed to object. “
Rape me
, Luke!” cried a fan at a Texas shopping mall. Another woman presented Geary with a homemade award for “America’s Most Beloved Rapist.”

It was perhaps a moment of mass neurosis, but the fans should have known better.
There had been a great
deal of discussion of rape over the previous decade, beginning with Susan Brownmiller’s
Against Our Will,
which had portrayed it as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” Rape, feminists said, was not about sexual desire but power. They began holding “Take Back the Night” marches to protest the way the threat of rape overshadowed their lives, keeping them trapped in their homes because they were afraid of walking alone after dark. Self-defense classes and rape-crisis centers sprung up around the country, particularly in college communities.

Many Americans living in the 1980s could remember a time when it was difficult—if not impossible—for a woman to bring rape charges against a man unless she had an eyewitness. In some states she had to prove she had been a virgin at the time of the attack. (Go back far enough in American history, and you will come to the point where people believed women could conceive a child only if she enjoyed the sex and that therefore there was no such thing as a rapist impregnating a victim.) In the ’80s the country had moved toward a far greater sympathy for women who claimed to be victims of sexual assault, and states had begun to pass rape “shield laws” that restricted defense lawyers’ ability to dredge up a victim’s entire sexual history in order to portray her as a tramp who “asked for it.”

The concept of date rape, however, was controversial. The idea that a woman could seem to lead a man on and then have the right to say “no” was a relatively new concept, particularly for people who had been brought up to believe that women were supposed to pretend to be reluctant to have sex even when they were in fact eager.
Susan Estrich, a Harvard
professor of sex-discrimination law, argued that sex became rape whenever it was against the woman’s will, even if she had been tricked or bullied into it without the threat of violence.
On the other side
, “postfeminists” led by Katie Roiphe, a doctoral student at Princeton, retorted that by downplaying women’s ability to hold their own against psychological pressure or the effects of alcohol, “rape-crisis feminists reinforce traditional views about the fragility of the female body and will.”

There were plenty of events that encouraged further debate, including a series of celebrity-rape trials. William Kennedy Smith, a physician and member of the famous political clan, was acquitted of charges brought by a woman who he had met in a Florida bar and taken for a walk on the beach. The trial was televised, and much of the nation watched Smith and his accuser (her head a white blur to conceal her identity) tell their dramatic and divergent stories. In the 1992 Mike Tyson trial, an 18-year-old contestant at the Miss Black America contest in Indianapolis said she had accepted a late-night date with the former boxing champion, believing she was going to meet celebrities—she showed up at her hotel lobby carrying a camera. But Tyson took her to his hotel room, where they chatted for a while, until she went to use the bathroom and emerged to find him stripped to his shorts. Tyson’s lawyers argued that the very fact that a young woman would go up to a man’s hotel room in the middle of the night proved that, as the boxer testified, she was a willing participant in consensual sex. But the jury felt otherwise, sending Tyson to jail and effectively ending his boxing career.

L
YNNETTE ARTHUR HAD A DIFFICULT CHILDHOOD.
Her mother, Dana, had loved taking care of her as a baby but fell into a period of depression and substance abuse that left Dana incapable of raising the little girl. Lynnette lived for a long time with her grandmother, and when Dana reclaimed her life and brought her daughter back to live with her, the reunion was fractious. Lynnette was “hanging out with these two guys” one night, an angry 17-year-old sitting in the bleachers of a remote playing field in Brooklyn not far from her mother’s apartment, smoking and drinking and arguing. Suddenly, one of the men turned on Lynnette and raped her. The men walked away together. Then the second—who Lynnette had actually been dating—stopped and went back. “I thought he was going to help me, but he just did it, too,” she said.

As she stood there crying, the man she did not really know started saying, “Yo, let’s kill the bitch.” She ran home with her attackers in pursuit.

When she came in the door, her mother knew immediately what had happened, and when Lynnette tried to take a shower, Dana took her instead to a hospital, where the nurses took evidence. Lynnette picked the men out in a lineup, but after she had given a deposition, she decided not to press charges.

“The lawyer was saying it would be a rough trial for me because it would be my word against theirs,” she said. “We were drinking… and their lawyer was definitely going to make me seem like I asked for it or I allowed it or something.”

“I believe you and I believe a jury would believe you,” her lawyer said. “But you have to understand this is what we’re taking on.” Lynnette decided not to go forward.

“Am I okay with that?” she asked herself afterward. Sometimes, she felt not. Once, she saw one of the men on the street. “I just remember my stomach kind of dropping and kind of feeling like—has he been punished enough?” There were no good answers. “I do believe in karma,” she said. “What goes around comes around.”

“…
THE LAUGHINGSTOCK OF THE TRIBAL WORLD
.”

In that poll for
the President’s Advisory Committee for Women, the one that was so astonishingly positive about women having important careers, most people still said they did not believe the country was ready to elect a female president. Perhaps as a compromise, the majority said that the United States would probably be ready to elect a female vice president by the end of the century. In 1984 the Democrats tried to push the timetable ahead a bit faster, nominating Geraldine Ferraro, a congresswoman from Queens, New York, as the party’s vice presidential candidate. (
Ferraro, who was
married to John Zaccaro but used her maiden name, helped the cause of “Ms.” when she told reporters that if she couldn’t be referred to as “Ms. Ferraro,” she wanted to be called “Mrs. Ferraro” to reflect the fact that she was, indeed, a wife and mother. That was too much for the
New York Times
language columnist, William Safire, who couldn’t countenance “Mrs.” in front of a maiden name but knew he couldn’t demand that a vice presidential candidate change her professional name to Mrs. Zaccaro. “It breaks my heart to suggest this, but the time has come for Ms.,” he wrote. “We are no longer faced with a theory, but a condition.”)

It was the same year Madeleine Kunin was running for governor of Vermont, and Ferraro arrived to campaign with her. Thousands of people turned out to greet them. “
Fathers brought their
daughters to see us, carrying them on their shoulders, holding them in their arms, leading them by the hand. ‘I want her to see this, to know this, so she’ll remember,’ a man said as he asked a bystander to snap our picture together: Gerry Ferraro, Daddy, the baby, and me.” Kunin was elected that November. Ferraro lost. Her campaign had been dogged by questions about her husband’s finances, but some said it had been a hopeless cause from the beginning, that her nomination had been a desperate Hail Mary pass for the Democrats, struggling against a popular president in Ronald Reagan with a qualified but hardly electric presidential candidate in Walter Mondale. Mondale’s record as an advocate of early child care certainly did him little good. Championing the child-care needs of working mothers was then, and is now, something that pays very few dividends for politicians at the polls.

W
ILMA MANKILLER HAD GOTTEN A DIVORCE
and a college degree, and had moved with her daughters back to Oklahoma, where she began working for the Cherokee tribal government. By 1981 she had been named director of the Cherokee Nation’s Community Development Department and met Charlie Lee Soap, the strong, quiet man she would marry a few years later. In 1983 the chief of the nation, Ross Swimmer, asked her to run for deputy chief on his ticket in the upcoming election. “
Because our tribe
is so large, running for tribal office is much like running for Congress or even a national political post,” Mankiller said. “It is very much a mainstream process, complete with print and broadcast advertising, campaign billboards, rallies, and all that sort of thing.” In this case it was also complete with rancor. Some of her fellow Cherokee claimed a woman running for such a high office was an affront to God. Others, she remembered, “said having a female run our tribe would make the Cherokee the laughingstock of the tribal world.”

She was shocked. “Everybody liked me. I was the person who helped them get electric lines built, water lines built. I was the person who helped everybody…. The female issue was very, very hurtful. Nobody seemed to be listening to the issues I cared about—housing, health care, services for children. They were more interested in debating whether a woman should be principal chief or not. People said some very hurtful things.”

They did not, however, defeat her. She won the election, and in 1985, when Swimmer moved to Washington to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs under Ronald Reagan, Wilma Mankiller became the first Native American woman ever to serve as a chief of a major American tribe. At the next election, she easily won in her own right.

“I
T MUST BE A SECRETARIAL POSITION, IS IT NOT
?”

Exit polls in the 1980 presidential election showed that 55 percent of male voters had supported the winner, Ronald Reagan, but that only 47 percent of the women had voted for him. Women—especially single women—were tending to favor the Democratic candidate, while men leaned toward the Republicans. The gender gap would widen during the Reagan years, then shrink when George H. W. Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, then widen again when Bush ran against Bill Clinton. The meaning of the gap would be debated over the next quarter century, but one clear factor was women’s higher support for safety-net programs such as Social Security and Medicare, and for government spending in areas such as education and social services.